As I write this, I am attempting to reduce the number of licenses allocated in the Adobe admin portal.
After hunting through the site, it appears easy to add, but impossible to remove licenses without going through sales support (instant response with a human), who then transfer you to the "Cancellation Team" which are remarkably hard to find online and have not replied to previous attempts at cancellation.
This is my third try, and the wait has been ridiculous. After finally being connected to a member of their cancellation team, they are "reviewing my request" and 1-2 minutes (please stand by) has turned into 15+
This experience has been so bad (on top of many others), that I'm strongly considering moving our entire org to open source tools (aside from InDesign for the publications group, which our partners require).
Following up: 50 minutes in chat and 5 rounds of back and forth like a used car dealership before they would agree to cancel.
Adobe: "Have 3 months free!"
Me: "We are no longer using these licenses."
Adobe: "But you are on the hook for a year. We have reset all of your licenses to have the same annual renewal date, regardless of when you purchased them."
Me: "We are no longer using these licenses. Free months are just a tactic in hopes that we miss the cancellation window and are forced to pay for another year."
Adobe: "We highly recommend that you accept our generous 3 months free offer."
Me: "That sounds a little ominous. Please cancel the licenses, effective immediately."
This is paraphrased, but follows the essential conversation. Adobe, you disappoint me.
Yet later, all the complaining when one uses pirated versions of their products. A company that behaves in these ways flatly deserves no consideration when choosing to simply use pirated editions of their software. Many people are way too forgiving of what should be considered blatantly shitty behavior by vendors yet heap blame on those who don't pay "fairly" for using the same company's products.
I agree with the general reasoning of what you say but in this case (and some others we could name) I'm tempted to call it a form of protest even. Basically letting them know that: "Your product is good enough that I respect it, but i think i'm justified in working around the way you've set up payment for it through so many dishonest dark patterns that some of them might arguably even be illegal themselves. So fix yourselves a bit first before acting like the only victims".
I wonder if this would work for SiriusXM and/or AT&T with their ever-creeping upward prices and reduced offerings - SiriusXM takes over non-sports channels for sports throughout the year, and at&t threatened to perma-ban my SIM cards if we tethered, even though i bought the SIM cards with the understanding that all three would be allowed to tether at-will. See, they removed "overages" but eliminated tethering during the full swing of pandemic, so that's the "new normal". I'll lay 50 for 1 that sometime this year they'll bring back overages, but not tethering.
Or in the case Wells Fargo, they're threatened with being fired if they don't meet sales quotas using unethical and illegal means. Then they're fired anyway when they are caught.
Sure, but such cognitive dissonance usually gets resolved in the long run, and the easiest way is to somehow convince yourself you're doing the right thing after all.
I haven't used creative cloud in a while and wanted to uninstall it: you need to log into the service and go through all updates in order to uninstall it.
In Adobe's defense, I had the opposite experience. We weren't using a product, and noticed that we'd been billed for 5 months for it.
They offered 3 months free. I asked if they could apply it retroactively since they could see we hadn't used it, and no longer needed it. Bit of a crazy request, but they did it!
If you do, please be sure to donate (time or money) to the open source projects to help better them! This is how open source can exceed commercial software. At the very worst case, if the projects tumble there's always a possibility to "fork" as an insurance policy.
I thought the advantage of subscription software is that you don't need to pay an expensive one time fee if you need software just for a short project. But if they make it hard to cancel, that really sucks.
If you're doing what I think you are, this is not possible except in the month that your yearly contract renews. I went through the same thing.
You've most likely got yearly licences that you pay off monthly, which means you can only modify on a yearly basis, so they don't let you modify most of the year.
Moving tooling is Hard, and the OSS stuff frankly sucks in comparison.
Give the Affinity [1] suite a serious look. It's not Photoshop or Illustrator, but for many users it really is a functional alternative and much of the tooling works similarly enough that it's usable (unlike much of the OSS stuff which just gets maddening). Pricing is also very sane.
I was a casual user of Illustrator but got tired of the monthly subscription and it wasn't really worth the money since I would only use it like 5 times a month.
I moved to Affinity designer about 4 years ago and I love it.
I use Affinity Designer for Mac (an Illustrator alternative). (90 day free trial, and then $40 one time after that - for lifetime ownership). So done with Adobe - their software is a total system hog, and they are now sketchy as an organization.
Truly disgusting. Why is it normal to be able to sign up for a service (such as internet service) completely self-service, with no human interaction, but as soon as I want to cancel the service, I have to call a 1-800 number and interact with a human? Comcast/Xfinity does this. Anti-consumer at best.
Adobe also charges 3 (I think) months penalty if you cancel CC. I have recently learned that if you reference covid-19 they immediately process anything you want with no penalties.
I suspect they don't want to end up on the wrong side of a crowdsource shitlist for penalizing people during the pandemic.
I believe this kind of thing is a big contributor to Amazon's hegemony in online shopping. I'm reluctant to order from other sites because there's a whole new set of dark patterns I may fall victim to. At least I'm familiar enough with Amazon to know I'm not getting charged for things I didn't intend to order, the low stock warnings are somewhat legitimate, etc. I'm not saying Amazon doesn't have its own issues, but at least it's a known quantity.
If it weren't for Amazon's dominance, other sites would be able to compete without resorting to these dark patterns, so this is a self-perpetuating cycle: people only shop on Amazon -> the only other sites that can survive are the ones that engage in deception -> trust in non-Amazon shopping sites decreases -> people only shop on Amazon -> ...
I don't mean to cast these scammy shopping websites as victims. My concern is more about how the legitimate sites that could exist don't because they're crowded out by Amazon (and other big players like Walmart) and the scammy shopping sites this article discusses.
Amazon earned a lot of loyalty from me with a light pattern. An Xbox they shipped me was stolen off of my porch and they replaced it with no questions. I've purchased other things from random outfits, had them charge the card and then just ghost me. If I could buy anywhere with the same confidence I have in Amazon then Amazon's hold on me would be a lot weaker.
Another leg up with Amazon is their free returns. I purchased over $200 worth of product from corsair.com with free shipping, but one item was defective (RGB mousepad regularly kills my entire USB stack every few hours - it's either defective or incompatible with my motherboard) and the cost to return it from Georgia -> California via USPS for RMA/refund is nearly a third of the item's price since Corsair doesn't pay for return shipping.
Another thing I like with Amazon is that you can easily know the exact date you have to return something. With Best Buy for example, they have a FAQ page by category, but I couldn't find nothing regarding turntables, for example. Way easier on Amazon - at least after you order - just going to your order page and seeing the return deadline there.
(My experience is with amazon.ca) Amazon is filled with the kinds of deception that the article discusses.
I dont have prime and the whole UI is set up to trick me into getting prime.
I always buy enough to get free shipping (which they show with a big banner), but it always defaults to paid shipping, that often needs to be removed item by item.
More often than not, books I search for default to kindle, and I have actually been tricked into buying a kindle version before.
They hide the fact that you are buying from a reseller as much as they can.
I could go on, but the point is I agree with you entirely.
As of 2012 Amazon sells more Kindle books than physical books in the UK. I suspect that hasn't changed since then. So I'd argue defaulting to kindle is the right product decision as it's the option the majority of users want.
Amazon Prime on the other hand is definitely a dark pattern.
Amazon has 15 years of shopping history from me that includes multiple physical books each month and 0 kindle purchases. Its possible they don't consider that and default to kindle for everyone, but they at least have the info to know that kindle versions are not what I'm after.
Amazon is incredibly good at converting consumer surveillance data in to money. They could easily default this (and many other things) to sensible per-user values. Given their competence and attention to detail, the reasonable guess here is that playing dumb on this default pays better than doing right by the user.
Maybe what's happening is: if you have a Kindle (you bough it form Amazon - or you bought kindle books on your account), they assume is likely you want a kindle version. If you don't have a Kindle, they want to show you how cheaper the Kindle version is, and maybe you will end up buying a Kindle.
They sell more e-books because the publishing industry colluded to jack up the price of paperbacks so that $10 e-books look like a bargain. I'm not paying $15 for a physical book that would have been $5 15 years ago. Their production overhead has been dramatically lowered by digital distribution and I'm expected to pay more?
I think it's the convenience for both buyers and sellers. If readers want the book "now" they get the kindle version; if they want it later they get the physical copy. However, Kindle in general is a dark pattern: it forces users to be locked into their product ecosystem.
> I don't have prime and the whole UI is set up to trick me into getting prime.
Back when I was still in college they offered a "6 month trial" of Prime Student. I agreed, made a mental note to cancel it in 5 months, and was shocked to find the next day that my card had been charged. There weren't any purchase screens, any terms to agree to, or anything to indicate that the trial they were peddling was in fact just an ordinary Prime Student subscription which would then renew in 6 months.
They hide the fact that you are buying from a reseller as much as they can.
I mean, it says Sold by X and Fulfilled by Amazon right under the add to basket/buy buttons. It's repeated on the order summary. I'm aware people keep missing this, but I don't really get it.
If you are not buying from Amazon, then nothing on the entire page should imply that you are.
Why is this not obvious to us? It wasn't to me either. There has got to be some cognitive bias at play here to lead to our acceptance of inverted principles like this. The framing of the problem is completely inverted, yet we're pretty much okay with that.
If it's not clear what I'm talking about here's another example:
"Why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide?"
This is also a reframing that presumes I do not have privacy and therefore bare the burden to prove I need it. People accept this frame and attempt to argue it directly all the time, when they should really just say "Why do you need to take it?" The burden of proof is on the taker.
Neither the buyer nor the seller should be so accepting of Amazon's attempt to obfuscate the actual parties involved in the sale. Amazon is just the payment processor and possibly providing storage and shipping services.
A real world analogy would be if every store that accepts VISA looked like a VISA store.
> More often than not, books I search for default to kindle, and I have actually been tricked into buying a kindle version before.
This can't really be something Amazon is intentionally trying to trick you into doing. There's no way for you not to notice that it happened, and you can just return the kindle book.
In general you just need to change it for each shipment - if multiple items are grouped together [because they're all at the same warehouse) then changing one shipment will change the shipping speed of all items within it. They probably should be defaulting to free shipping when it's available, though.
I'm not saying they aren't. What I'm trying to get across is that people are more used to and, therefore, inured to their dark patterns. There's a learning curve for navigating any website's dark patterns, so I'm more comfortable using a site whose dark patterns I believe I can recognize and avoid than one I haven't used before and am consequently more likely to be victimized by.
I'm definitely overestimating my own ability to avoid Amazon's scammy tactics. I, like most people, am reluctant to admit that I'm vulnerable to manipulation by things like these dark patterns (and ads, PR, etc.). But since I'm talking about my subjective feelings towards the websites, I think how good I _feel_ I am is relevant.
I totally agree with everything you've said, but just want to clarify my initial comment. I'm not trying to let Amazon off the hook, though they are less problematic than almost all of the other examples in the article.
One example is their "subscriptions" to products. It's very easy to accidentally order a recurring subscription to a shipped physical product, rather than just a one-time purchase.
that is not accurate. Amazon is brimming with dark patterns.
They walk the line between selling to customers and selling customers.
Over time, there are more and more "sponsored" results occluding and confusing my search results.
There are now warranty upsell screens on just about every purchase ("would you like coverage on your $5 part?")
They don't offer you the lowest cost on an item, you really have to drill down into all the offers to check.
If you block part of their site, things don't work - but if you sign in, all is well.
Can you delete your browsing history? Well, no. You can "hide" your browsing history but "removing items from view".
Search results are peppered with nonsensical results - that you searched for/bought before. I'm pretty sure this is timed with memory decay.
for example if 3 months ago you searched for dishes. Today when you search for computer parts, there might be a dish thrown into the results.
They talk about "free shipping" everywhere, but even if your cart is $500, you are opted-into non-free shipping and must manually select free shipping.
They don't tell you what is being sent in their shipping emails. But you can install their browser plugin and get all the info conveniently.
I have audible subscription and can say it is the definition of dark pattern if you have unused credits. either keep buying credits with the hope of someday using them or cancel and lose them all.
Here in Austria/Germany I see these dark patterns only from Amazon. They always try to get you to subscribe to prime, they mislead you with delivery times (my girlfriend has Prime and the website shows LONGER delivery times for her. Same item, browser signed into my account without Prime: shorter delivery time)
I want to support the local economy, so unless an item is only available on Amazon, I try to avoid buying from them. I've ordered from lots of different online stores in the past few years, and in my experience these dark patters are pretty rare.
Exactly. For all of that bullshit, plus Bezos' absolutely despicable conduct during Covid, I deleted my Amazon account and haven't looked back. Music gear? Thomann. Electronics? Digitec or Rakuten. And..., er, I'm struggling to think what Amazon was good for anyway. But regardless, unknown stuff? shopping.google.com
Honestly, of the top-x tech companies, Amazon is probably one of the easiest to quit, perhaps after Netflix.
ETA: And oh yeah. Books? Once again, search on shopping.google.com and buy from some small vendor.
I don't have any evidence to back this up, but in my recollection, that is the case. But it's hard to even compare e-commerce now to back before Amazon, when the web was much more niche and a lot of dark patterns weren't even technically possible yet.
It would be interesting to see where e-commerce would be today if a company as dominant as Amazon never came about. My hypothesis is that people would have more trust in a random shopping site they click on when Googling a product they want to buy, but it's impossible to test that.
Similar for platforms that let you build ecommerce sites, like Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, etc. They might be cookie cutter and usually over-priced for the level of hosting you get and the poorness of the wysiwyg site editing experience, but they solve a big problem of letting you get up and running with a trustworthy site fast.
It’s interesting though because there still are plenty of scam sites hosted by those platforms, plenty of dark patterns on Amazon too.
> At least I'm familiar enough with Amazon to know I'm not getting charged for things I didn't intend to order
You are better at online shopping than I am.
Amazon has tricked me into signing up for Prime twice. First time it was disguised as a shipping option. The second time I'm not sure exactly how they did it.
This is interesting - I feel like the site should separate dark patterns that add information from ones that lie or obfuscate. In my experience, consumers feel differently about these categories.
I've sat in on a few dozen user research sessions for ecommerce. This was qualitative research that included their general shopping habits, and additionally testing new features. The most interesting thing that I learned is that consumers (a) are generally pretty aware of when they're being pressured, and (b) are fine if it's transparent and accurate.
A classic example of this were low-stock notifications. The shoppers were generally okay with being told that something was low stock if that was really true. Many people could name specific items they lost because they were sold out. Some could also name instances of when they had bought something "1 item remaining" and seen it on sale the next day. They preferred having the information because it helped them make an informed decision. It turns out that lots of people browse the same items for a while, and use sales or almost-out-of-stock as a "now or never" moment.
The most interesting user session I ever sat in on was for a countdown timer for a sale ending. The designer refused to design it at first, and then was like, "fine, I'm going to design the hell out of this and then show you in user research that nobody wants this." And then she showed it to 5 people in user research, who were generally okay with it on the condition that it counted down to the actual sale ending. Some said they actually liked knowing, because when they're just looking on their phones they might not be in a good position to buy it, and want to know how much time they have later to get it. They said that they'll often refresh the page to see if the timer resets, because if it starts ticking from the same time, they feel like the site is just scammy and they'll leave.
Anyways, I'm not trying to defend lots of these patterns. Most of them are clearly wrong, and the ones that I mentioned above can also be used to lie and deceive. But I wouldn't put them all together - in my experience, consumers generally want accurate information even if they're aware that the company is doing it to pressure them.
The example session makes it clearer that they are talking about fake social proof and artificial urgency (if the promotion ends in 15 minutes, it is a fake one created just when you entered the site, real ones last until a round time or for days). Unless the examples are misleading, they should just name those categories better.
Totally, I agree that some of their specific examples mention this. Reading the whole site, it was not clear to me whether they holistically viewed "being honest about these things" as inside or outside the scope of their categorization, which prompted my comment
99% of these timers are completely bogus - if you open the same store on a new private browsing window you’ll see the timer reset. Or you’ll come back the next day and it’s expiring in <12 hours again.
Thank you for the link - I particularly enjoyed section 4, which really helped drive home that they're referring to patterns that induce a loss against some ideal: individual autonomy, societal welfare, etc. The paper puts much less of an emphasis on situations that are transparent to everyone. But they still had good examples of obviously harmful patterns like forced registration. Anyways, thanks!
I think it's more the reasons, if they include honest facts, partially justify the means. Of course, this could be because everyone thinks they're to smart to be influenced. In which case, they appreciate the true information but ignore the psyops.
>The shoppers were generally okay with being told that something was low stock if that was really true.
But isn't that true of pretty much anything? The problem for shoppers is that it's almost impossible to know if what you're being told is true, and most people have been burned by scummy sales practices too much to trust what a site is telling them since there's usually no way to verify it. Is the stock really low? Is the sale really about to end? How would the shopper know whether it is or whether it's a lie to trick them?
Insurance company I use to work for made it really difficult to actually buy their car insurance online cos they'd virtually always loose money if you bought their online deals. The website tried to get you to phone with your quote so that sales reps could bump your price up for basically no reason. If this was too much then they'd pretend to talk to their manager for a few mins to "see if they could get you a good deal" come back on the phone and make up another price for you. Worked on old people best. Lovely.
Did it increase total profit? I won't pick up the phone unless I have no other option, and I won't call someone just to get a quote. Besides, those sales rep cost money too.
I bet it doesn't make any more profit than an equivalent service managed fully online, but making all the people in the current operation redundant is "politically" difficult (or even impossible/very costly depending on employment laws) so they continue as-is.
In California, if you sign up for something on-line the law requires that you be able to cancel it on-line, too. This has been a wonderful development, and now it's easy to cancel things like XM subscriptions, etc.
I had great results switching my payment method to recurring via PayPal and then using the PayPal interface to cancel the recurring charge, FWIW. Any time a merchant with recurring charges lets you use PayPal you can usually cancel the subscription in that way.
I did the same for a magazine that made cancellation all but impossible, using a virtual credit card. I switched the payment method for the subscription and set the card to deny all charges. Then I just had to endure two months of "you're losing access to your subscription" spam. :/
I've had booking.com tell me "Hurry! There are only x rooms left!" when I've been to the property before, and know that x is a number larger than the entire number of rooms that exist.
There's also a secret search term that turns on every single live A/B test, making the site essentially unusable. I don't know what it is but a Booking.com employee may be willing to share if you every catch them after a few drinks.
It's really bad, but it's still my favourite site to book hotels. I can filter for all criterias that matter to me and have all my bookings in one place. And their hotline worked for me when something went wrong.
Luckily my brain can filter most of the dark patterns.
I do (did) use it too, but then book through the hotel's own website, unless the price difference is too big. I'm not going to oversubsidize some search engine.
Wasn't there an article here recently about some site that was supposedly telling you how many other people were looking at the same item, and a look a the javascript showed that it was basically a (small) random number generated on page load?
It lists "forced enrollment" as an example of "forced action" which is tangential action required tobe completed. For me, a recpatcha step asking me to classify traffix lights or cars is one as well.
Imagine if each of the the web developers creating these websites actually ran a physical store and had to deal face-to-face with the public. Real, live customer service. No keyboard to hide behind. What would those businesses be like? Would anyone shop there?
One of the worst I came across is TeamViewer. You can sign up instantly for your organisation.
They throughout your time on them send you a spammy marketing email once every 3 to 5 days - the sort of stuff that's everyone ignores. You get one renewal remind amongst all that crap a week before your final month, usually sandwiched between two other mails.
Then when you want to cancel it...there is no easy link to cancel online they way their is to sign up. To top it off, you have to cancel it before that final month before hand by opening up a ticket on their system. Then it's not automatically cancelled, they setup a call to speak to a rep. If you miss that and then you enter your final month - they automatically renew and make you pay for another year up front! Even endless calls with the German call centre does not get a refund for this dark pattern.
I am massively against most of these, but I think a few are ok:
- Low-stock Message - when this data is true, I'm very happy to see it. I can say for sure it's true on the nike website, thing have gone out of stock an hour later or after I have ordered it. So I appreciate it when it's true.
- Countdown timers - A countdown timer to the end of a sale seem perfectly reasonable to me. Some sales are quite good and I like to know when they're going to end.
What concerns me when reading such articles is that if lying is so prevalent and there is still no action against the bad actors, then the GDPR tracking checkboxes on many sites are likely also just sent to /dev/null?
At least in my experience, one gets subscribed to many things they explicitly opted out from. It is very easy to say later if somebody digs to just say yes was clicked instead of no or there was a bug affecting a small portion of their traffic.
Some of the things listed are sales techniques I expect from a business. If businesses want to set themselves apart by being more straightforward, that's another way to sell.
I'm left wondering if the authors take advertisements at face value as well?
"After extensive research, we found that the stain could be removed, but not as easily as shown in the TV advert. As academics, we conclude that this is dark and deceptive."
After hunting through the site, it appears easy to add, but impossible to remove licenses without going through sales support (instant response with a human), who then transfer you to the "Cancellation Team" which are remarkably hard to find online and have not replied to previous attempts at cancellation.
This is my third try, and the wait has been ridiculous. After finally being connected to a member of their cancellation team, they are "reviewing my request" and 1-2 minutes (please stand by) has turned into 15+
This experience has been so bad (on top of many others), that I'm strongly considering moving our entire org to open source tools (aside from InDesign for the publications group, which our partners require).